making progress.

I managed to create a new database, connect to it via workbench on my laptop and add tables and rows.

also, setup incoming and outgoing ftp folders.

this is all a bit old school though, because we are basically going to have to pole the incoming directory.

anyway, it is useful in that I am growing more comfortable with remote sql connections.

I will extract my university model into MySQL format then , maintain t in MySQL Work bench,

Also looking at a micro services approach to data storge, so this would probably be a set of services talking to smaller data bases that sync with each other through a sort of operational data store. I imagine mysql databases, feeding changes down rabbitmq work queues so all data sets are eventually consistent.